Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

‘The fellow that just walked out of here? He says she’s dead. His girl says she’s alive. An ugly woman like that – who would want to kill her?’

  He had a couple of the facts wrong, but Felicity must have gotten a ride to the doublewide somehow, and I doubted she had her own car. ‘What did the guy who picked her up look like?’

  ‘Don’t know. They say he was a white guy.’

  ‘Young, old? Fat, skinny?’

  He gave me a curious look. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did the car have a color?’

  He smiled. ‘You’re working this, Johnny?’

  ‘I only do skip trace.’

  His face fell. ‘I don’t see you doing no skip trace either. Why do you care what color the car was?’

  ‘Is that falafel ready?’

  He looked offended. ‘Sure, Johnny.’

  He drained the fry basket, cut the pita, and bagged my sandwich. I paid him and left a couple bucks on the counter.

  ‘I don’t want your tip, Johnny,’ he said.

  I shrugged and stuffed the bills into my pocket.

  As I left the restaurant, he said, ‘Black. They say the car was black.’

  ‘Thanks, Farouk. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.’

  My office smelled of rubber and mildew, and, after I turned on my computer, I propped open the front door and slid the window wide in the little bathroom. Farouk had told me nothing I could depend on. Still, I was curious why Felicity had hooked up with Stephen Phelps and why she had been hanging out at Tobias Rib when I’d gone there with Papa Crowe.

  As I ate my falafel, I Googled Kingsland Georgia, which was the town closest to where I shot Felicity. I added newspaper, and found an online edition of The Tribune & Georgian. If the site updated throughout the day, I expected to find at most a quick mention of an accidental shooting on a local news or crime page. Instead, the homepage opened with a headline that said, Former Princess of the Night Singer Shot. The article said a sixty-three-year-old woman named Felicity Metz had been hospitalized with a gunshot wound to her leg after an apparent domestic accident. But the bigger story was that she once had been somebody. At the age of fourteen, Felicity had sung solo at Evans’ Rendezvous, the best black nightclub at American Beach, and a guitarist named Arnie Metz had heard her and fallen in love. They’d married on her fifteenth birthday. They’d found a drummer and a trumpet player, and the band had gone on the road as Princess of the Night, she being the princess. The band played black nightclubs in Georgia and Florida and as far west as New Orleans from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, and had a moment of fame when they traveled to Memphis and recorded a single played by radio stations all around the country.

  In the past four decades, the report said, she’d suffered from drug and alcohol abuse and had been arrested for narcotics violations and prostitution. This morning, an unknown driver had brought her to the University Hospital ER. Doctors said she was in stable condition and expected to recover.

  I Googled Felicity Metz and found a couple of music sites that said she and her band played a mix of blues, rock, and gospel, with Gullah influences that went unrecognized by white listeners at the time but had been noted by archivists in the past ten years. She was born Felicity Thomas, daughter of a St Simons cotton farmer. The Memphis single, called ‘Do What You Will,’ rose as high as eighth spot on the Rock and Roll charts early in 1967. Her husband, Arnie Metz, credited with inventing a new style of guitar picking, was arrested on narcotics charges in 1973 and died from a drug overdose shortly after release in 1977.

  I walked back to the Sahara Sandwiches Shop. Farouk was refilling a Coke cup for a skinny man whose arms were covered with scratches and scabs. I said, ‘Did you know she used to be a singer?’

  ‘Of course. Everyone knows that.’ Farouk turned to the scabbed man. ‘Timmy, tell him what the guy looked like, the one that picked up Felicity.’

  The man stared at me with narrow, bloodshot eyes. ‘A big white dude. That’s what they’re saying.’

  ‘Who’s saying it?’ I asked.

  ‘She was hanging out with a couple of girls, and the car pulled up and the dude called her over.’

  ‘Do they say what else he looked like?’

  ‘Nah, just big and white.’ He picked at a scab on one of his arms.

  ‘Did she recognize him?’

  ‘Maybe. Funny thing, she got in the backseat, not the front.’

  ‘That’s because he was the delivery boy. He was bringing her to someone else.’

  Farouk nodded. ‘That’s good, Johnny.’

  I went back to my office, locked up, and drove down Philips to the Barakat Food Store, which sold almost everything a drifter, addict, or hooker might want between destinations, hits, or johns. The store had a sale on Marlboros and Salems, and I bought a carton of each.

  Three miles north of downtown, University Hospital was a white cube of a building, about twenty stories high and equally long and wide, connected by an elevated walkway to another cube of the same size and a second walkway to a set of low-rise buildings. Inside the main entrance, a volunteer at the information desk said Felicity Metz was in Room 607. The place was the major trauma hospital in the city. If you arrived at another hospital with a gunshot wound, life-threatening burns, or a bleeding brain, the doctors would stabilize you if they could and then ship you by ambulance or helicopter across town. The neighborhood around the hospital was poor and high-crime, and the hospital rose from among the dilapidated houses and open ditches like a cathedral.

  The volunteer pointed me toward the elevator bank, and I rode up with two doctors in scrubs and a halter-topped teenager so pregnant her skin looked as if it would split.

  Daniel was stepping out of Room 607 when the elevator door opened. He saw me and said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I said nothing. As I passed, he grabbed my shoulder. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘The stripper twins got in an accident,’ I said, and shook him free.

  He watched as I walked toward the hooker’s room. ‘You can’t go in there,’ he said.

  I saw no reason why not.

  Felicity was lying at a slant in her hospital bed, an IV in her wrist, her bandaged thigh elevated on a pillow, the skin around the bandages gray, her pink hair spread like a halo against a white pillow. She looked perplexed to see me. ‘Hey, sugar,’ she said, her voice rounded by painkillers.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. Afternoon sunlight came through the window. Aside from the intermittent beeping of a monitor, the place was quiet. I checked over my shoulder, expecting Daniel to come after me, but he left me to whatever trouble I made for myself.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ Felicity asked.

  ‘Everyone’s talking about you on Philips. So I brought you a present.’ I put the cigarettes on the bed.

  She screwed her eyes at me. ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘You’re always asking for them.’

  ‘I ain’t in no condition for sex.’

  ‘I don’t want sex.’

  She picked up the carton of Salems and examined it as if looking for tricks. ‘You’re a peculiar one.’

  ‘But I do want something.’

  Her voice became cynical. ‘Of course.’

  I could tell her it wasn’t like that, but again I saw no reason why. ‘Who was the man who picked you up on Philips Highway?’

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘Your friends on Philips saw it. They say you got into a car with a big white man. I expect they also told the police.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you the same thing I said to the police when they asked. I don’t know what my friends are talking about.’

  ‘How did the police like it when you said that?’

  ‘They seemed happy enough. Less work for them.’

  ‘I’m not happy, though.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘The guy who picked you up is a pale-skinned man. You can see the blue of the veins in his
hands and on his forehead. He works for the Phelpses.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve got enough trouble already. I don’t need more.’

  ‘He’s a mean man – or maybe just nervous. He sometimes carries a bat, and he’ll hit you with it if he gets a chance, though he’s big enough to break your back with his empty hands.’

  ‘Sounds like you know him already.’

  ‘Peter Lisman?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ she said.

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘Will you take back the cigarettes if I don’t tell you?’

  ‘No. They’re a gift.’

  ‘Then I’ve got nothing to say.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. I stared at her for a long time. She stared back. I asked, ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Flying high. They say the bullet went in and out. They say I’m lucky. Do I look lucky to you, sugar?’

  ‘I don’t know what lucky looks like anymore.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth.’

  ‘When I saw you at Tobias Rib, you said you’d known the Phelpses your whole life – ever since you were fourteen, you said. Did you meet them when you were singing at Evans’ Rendezvous?’

  She seemed unsurprised that I knew about her singing, the way that once-famous people learn to expect such knowledge, even from strangers.

  ‘Nah, but it was around that time. Mr Phelps hired me to sing at a private party. And afterward, when I went to get my money, I got to know Mr Phelps real good. The bastard never paid me neither. He told me to go back to the swamps where I came from.’

  ‘This was Edward Phelps?’

  ‘No, Edward was young – about my own age. This was his daddy.’ She gave me a challenging stare. ‘Edward came later. Then Stephen.’

  ‘The Phelps men must really like you.’

  ‘Like isn’t the word.’

  ‘Were you with Stephen Phelps when you got shot?’

  She looked suspicious. ‘Now, why would you think that?’

  ‘You pretty much said that the man who picked you up on Philips Highway works for the Phelpses, and you just said you’ve been having sex with Stephen. The Phelpses seem to be involved in just about everything that causes pain around here.’

  ‘True enough.’ The suspicion remained.

  ‘What did he threaten to do if you told the police?’

  ‘I don’t take to threats. Never did.’

  ‘What did he promise you?’

  She smiled a cunning smile, though I saw cracks of uncertainty. ‘I still don’t understand your game.’

  ‘Simple,’ I said. ‘I want to bring down the Phelpses.’

  The smile spread. ‘Simple, huh? Why do you want to do that?’

  Because I had rocked like a baby in the underbelly of a ship instead of taking down another enemy, I thought. Because I hadn’t been taken down either. I said, ‘To appease myself.’

  ‘It’ll never happen.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because you’re a little man and they’re a big old powerful family. And because no one gets appeased. You can go to church or you can go to a rally, but it’s never happened and never will.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Then you’re stupid too. The Phelpses will step on you.’

  ‘Like they stepped on you?’

  ‘I never had false hopes, so they couldn’t do it.’

  I was wasting my time. ‘I’m sorry you got shot,’ I said.

  Again she screwed her eyes at me. ‘I do believe you are.’

  ‘Enjoy the cigarettes,’ I said, and turned to go.

  ‘Sometimes he sleeps in a room over the garage at Edward Phelps’s house.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Peter Lisman. I think he also has a place in downtown Fernandina, over a bookstore.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘If you bring the Phelpses down, you’ve got to bring them all the way down. Because if they get back up, they’ll step on you. They’ve done it for a hundred fifty years.’

  The Book Loft stood in a row of two-story brick buildings on Centre Street near the Fernandina harbor. The other businesses on the strip sold plastic pirate memorabilia, sea shells, postcards, and starfish-shaped chocolates. I parked outside a few minutes before six, as the restaurants were moving blackboards with happy-hour specials back inside and arranging tables on the sidewalk for dinner. The yellow building that housed the bookstore had only a single door, which led into the business, and so, unless the building had a rear entrance that led to the second story or Peter Lisman entered through the shelves of books, Felicity had made a mistake. Other buildings on the strip had street entrances to their upstairs rooms, though, and I walked up the sidewalk, crossed the street, and walked down the other side, checking the name plates next to the buzzers until I found one, fading with age, that said, K and P Lisman. As a man pushed a dolly with a keg of beer into a bar two storefronts away, I tried the knob to the street door. The door was open.

  I pushed the buzzer and, instead of waiting for an answer through the intercom, went inside and climbed the stairs. At the second-floor landing, there were two doors, both painted burgundy red, each with a security peephole. I listened for footsteps and heard none. I rattled one of the doorknobs. Locked. I reached for the other knob, but a voice spoke into the intercom from inside the door. ‘Yes?’ It was a woman’s voice, frail and uneasy.

  I figured she would check the hall if no one answered from below.

  She did.

  A lock tumbled and the door swung open. A heavy blond-haired woman sat in a wheelchair. She wore pink sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt and looked about fifty years old. She said, ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Is Peter here?’ I said.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ she said.

  ‘He lives here?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  I stepped past her into the apartment.

  She cried, ‘Hey!’ and turned after me.

  The air in the room smelled like modeling glue. There was a couch, a television, a curio cabinet, and, in the middle of it all, a long folding table covered with parts of porcelain dolls – figurines of pirates, black slaves, little boys in shorts, Confederate soldiers draped in Confederate flags, little girls in dresses, a horse, a dog – and all the miniature clothing or porcelain accoutrements they might need. Some were fully assembled, some already painted and dressed. The woman seemed to have been painting a fat black female doll. She’d set clothing – a polka-dotted housedress, a head rag, and cotton slippers – and a little black porcelain frying pan next to the wooden rack that held the doll.

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ she said, and wheeled toward a telephone on an end table next to the television.

  ‘Are you Peter’s mother?’

  She picked up the phone and dialed.

  One door led from the room into a kitchen, another into a bathroom, and two others into bedrooms. One of the bedrooms had a white canopy bed and shelves lined with porcelain dolls. I went into the other. The window shades were down, the air musty with the smell of sweaty clothes, the bed unmade. There was a red easy chair and, on a wooden desk, a laptop computer. I opened the top desk drawer. Along with assorted pens and pencils, paperclips, and a broken stapler, there were a couple of loose photographs of a sea adventure park employee feeding fish to a killer whale in a large blue pool and a photograph of a tiger in a zoo enclosure – the kind of simple pictures one might find in a desk owned by a ten-year-old boy.

  The woman in the other room was on the phone with a police dispatcher. In a town this size, I probably had only a minute or two before officers came up the stairs.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I yelled from the bedroom. I glanced once more around the room and eyed the laptop. I grabbed it and carried it out through the front room and downstairs to the street.

  Forty-five minutes later, I let myself back into my office. I searched the computer, and learned that Peter Lisman really liked ani
mals. In his photo files, he had hundreds – maybe thousands – of pictures that he’d taken at zoos, at wildlife theme parks, and in nature preserves, as well as in and around Fernandina. A ‘Dolphins’ file included shots from SeaWorld as well as from a beach. The elephants were from a zoo. Lisman had photographed possums and squirrels in parks and backyards. He’d been to a farm with horses, but most of the horse pictures were of the wild ones that lived on Cumberland Island. The pictures included predator cats, snakes, tropical fish, deer, kangaroos, and alligators. But no birds. He seemed to limit his love to animals of the ground and sea.

  His internet search history showed that he spent about equal time looking at pictures of animals and a wide range of porn.

  The laptop told me little else about him. He apparently kept no computer records of his finances. If he wrote letters, he wrote them by hand. If he liked music, he listened to it on the radio. If he kept track of the people he smashed on the head with baseball bats, he did so by notching his belt with a pocketknife.

  I closed the laptop and checked my cell phone. No messages from Lillian. I locked the office, put the laptop in my trunk, and drove home. Maybe Lillian would be there waiting for me. What would she say? What would I say?

  Her car wasn’t in the driveway, and the house was dark and quiet. The sun was lowering, reddening into a western haze. Usually, she would have been home a couple of hours ago.

  Should I call her?

  Yes.

  Would I?

  I needed her to call me.

  What would I do if she didn’t call?

  Disintegrate.

  I left the .22 and the laptop in the trunk and went inside. The air conditioning chilled the sweat on my arms, and when I flipped on the front hall light, the house looked empty and sad. I felt like turning around and driving far away to a place where the people I encountered would look past me as insignificant to their lives. I felt like unlocking the car trunk, retrieving the .22, and going to a farther-away place.

  I needed my meds. I went to the bedroom, swallowed a Xanax, and lay on the bed in the dark. After a while, my blood calmed and my breathing slowed. I got up, checked my cell phone again, though I knew it hadn’t rung, and walked to the kitchen. Usually, when Lillian and I came home, Percy barked until we let him in from the backyard. This evening he was quiet. A lamp shined through the kitchen door from the sunroom.